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AMD Releases 3D Programming Documentation

Phoronix: AMD Releases 3D Programming Documentation

For the past several weeks we have been referencing AMD's "tcore" in several of our articles, which is a user-space software suite that has been developed and used internally at ATI by engineers to work on various aspects of their binary drivers. Tcore is primarily used for testing prior to the availability of the actual silicon for their forthcoming graphics processors. John Bridgman and Alex Deucher have been working tediously to get this tcore source-code sanitized and cleared for public release, and finally they have reached this milestone. AMD has just published the first bits of open-source 3D programming documentation for ATI GPUs. This 3D programming documentation covers the R500 series and even goes back with information on the R300/400 series as well. The R600 3D programming guide will also be out soon. This information available today is what will foster the growth of open-source R500/600 3D support for the Radeon and RadeonHD drivers as well as R600 2D acceleration.

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Yes, we believe we have provided enough support for all the GL2.x functionality. Having said that, implementing a driver to actually *do* all that is a non-trivial amount of work.

First priority is going to be getting the current level of functionality working reliably on all the new ASICs, but we did want to get enough info out so that Gallium and GL2.x work could also be tackled. One of the participants on the review team was our SW OGL architect, who was advising in part on which features we needed in order to support a fully functional OpenGL driver.

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I'll quote myself from other thread.
How about the just released 3D documentation for R300-R500? Is it enought to implement near fglrx (or even better) 3D support in open source radeon driver for R300?
I'm looking espesially for vertex and pixel shaders and other "magic things" in 3D code which fglrx has and radeon doesn't have, yet.

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IMHO, I think that AMD should today already (in parallel to RadeonHD) outsource the project of making a open source Gallium3D device-driver for ATI GPUs to a dedicated team working full-time on it while the Gallium architecture is still in early development, ...same as how Intel have hired Tungsten Graphics to do the heavy lifting for them.

That way AMD could get some early saying on how Gallium should be designed from the ground, before it is too late and the wheel have to be reinvented from scratch again.

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I think they'll first create the basic 3d code, just to make things work, and then they'll stabilize it.
After that they can add compiz support (still to just make things work) and then they'll optimize it. Speed isn't a that important feature yet as radeonhd is still in a relatively young development phase.